Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Tamminen]

Consider: one cannot "see" the eye, for in the seeing, the conditions of sight that you are trying to examine are part of the "observation" in receiving data.

In a mirror you can see your eye as you are looking at your eye, but what you see is the material correlate of your seeing, not yourself, the subject of seeing. You can see your eye, but you cannot see your I. You can see yourself only by reflection, turning inwards. And when you see yourself, you understand that everything depends on your existence. This opens up a new way of seeing the world. I think you have seen this clearly, but only few seem to understand what you say in your posts. I find all of them very profound and important.

[Hereandnow]

Sculptor1

You still have not said what you mean by this, or why it is important, or special.

I should tell you, Sculpture1, that I am not being clever or original. (Frankly, there are no original ideas left and philosophy has met its end in postmodernism.) These are strange ideas to your ears because philosophy is about strange ideas we encounter when we examine the assumptions about the world at the most basic level. If you read enough of it, you will NOT believe as you do now.
I lifted it from Wittgenstein, who was inspired by Kant, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Plato...everyone. The basic idea I think is succinctly put by Richard Rorty: "I never could see how it is that anything out there (pointing to objects in the world) gets in here (pointing to his head)". From there, inquiry goes absolutely insane, and you begin to see that the world in the perceptual act is complex. What is the thought that conceives the object? How can we understand the object AS a thought about the object and still preserve the independence of the thing? Is it possible at all to understand objects in the world as they are. or are we always, in the perceptual encounter, already interpreting the object AS an object. What does AS mean here? And so on, and so on.
This is the tip of the tip of an iceberg that has eternity beneath the surface.
If you really want to know and are genuinely philosophically intrigued, read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason for starters. Why not take a few months and see what the man has to say?

[Hereandnow]

Tamminen

Now that we have concluded that transcendence is a meaningful concept only as transcendence for immanence, and that the being of the subject is a necessary component of reality, we can go further and try to figure out if it is possible that also transcendence, the being of the material world, could be interpreted in terms of immanence, the self-evident existence of the subject. I have tried to speculate on this elsewhere.

The universe seen as a totality is like God: our existence depends on it. But without our existence God, if there were something like that, would lose its reason of being. The same would happen to the world if the subject were removed. So materialism, at least as it is presented by Consul and others here, is even less plausible than the God hypothesis, because nobody has claimed that God without the subject's existence means anything.

Where have you speculated on this elsewhere?

It is the most fascinating thing I can think of: the "knowing" set apart from the world, yet issuing from and within it, and the I standing there in the midst, a thinking actuality thrown into death, suffering, bliss, euphoria. If one looks with the intent to find deeper intimacy with the world rather than trying to bring the world to heel within its systems of what Levinas calls Totality, then, I think, one stands on the brink of epiphany. even Heidegger related a serious take on Buddhism, thinking it may hold the essence of a future language that issues from the silence; he also in his "Only a God Can Save US" interview of 1966 seems to break with what I took him to have which was an uncompromising confinement within the possibilities of language and interpretation.

God, in my eyes, is, like all terms, a pragmatic stand in for things that are mysteries at the level of basic questions. And like all terms, it can be misleading as it has a long history of assimilative meaning, that is, meanings that rise out of attempts to make sense of the world as the world. It is inherently anthropomorphic. I am considering taking a very close look at Eastern philosophical terminology that is free of a lot of this. Though Westerm philosophy should never be abandoned: it as run the course fully, completely, and come to the logical conclusion that in order to move forward, we must keep silent, as Heidegger put it in that interview, to keep extraneous things out, to keep the technological conditioning from defining us from without.

[Tamminen]

Where have you speculated on this elsewhere?

For instance:
viewtopic.php?p=301123#p301123
viewtopic.php?p=330898#p330898